Youtube Blowout 1: Brian Clough

The BEST Clough clip has been pulled by ITV. A pointless step backwards by them; it was only about two minutes long after all. But this is a fine substitute, with some very rare material:

Clough, Taylor, Forest

Online clips featuring Brian Clough are exasperatingly thin on the ground - and those of Peter Taylor.. so this excellent Youtube post simply has to feature here.

Autochrome colour photography was invented before the First World War, but no one thought to take a camera into the East End. Kodachrome and workable colour film photography emerged by 1935, but no one thought to take their colour camera or cine equipment to a match.

No one filmed a Clough dressing room either, to my knowledge. It’s a bloody shame.

Clough and Revie in Conversation

Things are returning to normal at More Than Mind Games Mansions, albeit little by little. In the meantime, don’t miss this lengthy interview between Austin Mitchell, Brian Clough and Don Revie which took place after Clough’s sacking by Leeds after 44 days in office.

There’s very, very little Revie on the net - make the most of this.

Internet Explorer recommended, unfortunately:

Clough and Revie

A Clough Derby

Derby County vs Nottingham Forest 1979:

It says something for the social progress we’ve had in the UK in the last twenty years that of the companies advertising at the Baseball ground that day - Unipart, Servis, Carling Lager - it’s Carling who have gone from strength to strength (2% to 4.7% in the case of Carling Premier).

Brian Clough Part Ten

It’s often forgotten, in the wake of Clough’s mythologising, that Derby County are a club with real history behind them. Far from coming from nowhere under his tutelage, Derby were in fact one of the twelve clubs who played in the first Football League Season of all, in 1888, finishing tenth. From the late 1920s until the Coronation in 1953, they were a formidable force in the First Division, winning the FA Cup and featuring regularly in the Cup semi-finals (their relative lack of luck in that respect being put down, with the superstition typical of English football, not to skill or tactics but to a gypsy curse). Two disastrous mid-1950s years saw them fall to the Third Division (North), from where they were immediately plucked out by Peter Taylor’s mentor Harry Storer.

By the time Clough arrived at the Baseball Ground, Derby were a safe mid-table bet in Division Two, but becalmed there, seemingly unable to make that final leg-up to the top division. Once again, Len Shackleton was Clough’s go-between, determined to see the young man who saw things his way move up through the ranks.

That was certainly how Clough saw it, looking back after retirement.

I only got the job through Len’s introduction to Derby. I went there, stayed there and then it all took off from there, managerial-wise. So that’s what I owe Len Shackleton. If I had threepence in my pocket, I’d owe him tuppence of it, because one penny was my contribution. Len, initially - and this is so important - was the breakthrough. He got me through the door, and I did the rest.

Clough had at this time in his life barely left the north east of England. When Shackleton mentioned Derby to him for the first time, Clough didn’t know where Derby was - and felt it a long way to go. By contrast, the chairman of Derby, Sam Longson, was very much aware of Clough, and had come to admire him both as a man and as a leader of men. He had seen Clough play for Sunderland, and had followed his progress at Hartlepools with great personal interest.

It was interest that Shackleton sharpened up with a lie, telling Longson that West Bromwich Albion - a successful First Division side then enjoying their first foray into Europe - were preparing a contract for Clough.

Longson, and Derby’s vice-chairman, met Clough more than half way in their efforts to secure him. Clough recalled:

They settled on a hotel called the Scotch Corner Hotel, which was a racing hotel. And I said to Len Shackleton, ‘Why the racing hotel?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘A lot of people go there.’ And, you know, to this day I don’t know one end of a horse from the other! So I said, ‘Ok, we’ll go there.’ Sam Longson, to his credit, came up, with the vice chairman. We had an hour, an hour and a half, then two hours together, and it got to the stage where I said: ‘Look, I’ve got to go and you’ve got to get back down there. What’s the procedure?’ To which Longson replied, ‘Oh, you’ve got the job now! I’d like you to come down to Derby to a board meeting to confirm it. Just a rubber stamp.’ So I must have said something right in those two hours.

If he did, it would not be something he’d do very often over the next five years. But it would take all of Clough’s determined anti-authoritarianism to alienate Longson, who in the late sixties had a deep personal inclination and fondness for Clough, describing him in loose moments as the son he had never had. In some senses, Longson’s problems wouldn’t be over his “son”, but, as in the battle with Ernie Ord, over the son’s blood-brother, Peter Taylor.

Clough’s first act on arrival at Derby County was to use the freshness of his authority to bounce the board into appointing Peter Taylor as his deputy, properly this time and without the cover of a faked training post. At the same time, Clough’s unique persuasiveness and salesmanship came into play in negotiations for rather more money for players than he had given the board reason to expect - reason to expect, that is, whilst he was applying for the job. Once again, Clough’s focus was entirely footballing, and the business, administrative sides to the game, the job of keeping a club afloat, came nowhere.

Neither did the club’s history. Clough went through Derby’s corridors, lifting down all of the pictures and photographs of the famous teams and players of the past, from Bloomer onwards - even Harry Storer failed to escape, although it would be on the Storer model that Clough built his famous Derby sides.

The players of the present, who might have been excited at the prospect of Clough’s arrival, soon learned how the land lay. “You’ve got three weeks to make an impression on me,” Clough told them at the first team meeting (the surviving photograph of this event shows Clough and team wreathed in smiles) “..and if I don’t rate you, you’re out.”

Four - just four - members of the first team squad survived: Kevin Hector, Alan Durban, Ron Webster and goalkeeper Colin Boulton. The Club Secretary, the groundsman and the Chief Scout were all also fired - and so were two tea ladies Clough caught laughing after a Derby defeat. (By contrast, Reg Matthews, the reserve keeper, was, uniquely, permitted to smoke during training, by dint of his five England caps won back in 1956).

There would be echoes of this dramatic behaviour in Clough’s bull-in-a-china-shop arrival at Leeds in 1974, and in his abrupt, unsuccessful rebuilding of the Nottingham Forest side in 1982-3. It had relatively little to do with football. But plenty to do with the exercise of raw power - Clough, like most top football managers, obsessed about domination over others, and the first weeks at a new club gave opportunities for the exercise of power for its own sake that would soon disappear.

How wise it was is open to question. Clough excused himself by claiming that he had to make his mark in those first weeks - but the facts of Clough’s first season in charge at Derby are that he failed to improve their league standing at all.

For all that, the core of his team took shape within that unsuccessful first year. Clough and Taylor’s ideas about team building were purest Harry Storer. Storer had been a skilful, cultured player, winning England caps in the 1920s, but as a manager built his team around strong, uncompromising centre backs and centre halves.

A strong, uncompromising dog, Billy, sat growling outside Storer’s office, waiting for any player ready to complain about having been dropped from the team. As Sheffield United manager, Joe Mercer once dared to mention to Storer that six Derby players had been guilty of over-physical play.”Give me their names,” demanded the Derby manager. “Why, are you going to fine them?” asked Mercer. “No, it’s the other five buggers I’m after,” Storer snapped back.

Clough’s teams took a similar shape - the important positions were goalkeeper (Colin Boulton/Reg Matthews), centre half and centre forward. Like Storer’s, his teams were required to show heart (“moral courage” Clough and Taylor called it), respect referees, keep the ball on the floor and take advantage of “the quick ball.”

It’s unlikely that the way Clough went about actually acquiring his team bore much resemblance to Storer’s practice, however. For one thing, Storer didn’t have a Taylor. In Clough’s opinion, Taylor was a better judge of a player than he was. Taylor would identify the man the team required, then send Clough out after him.

Given Clough’s lunatic courage and risk-taking, to say nothing of his revivalist persuasiveness and “demonic” (John McGovern’s choice of word) energy, this made Clough and Taylor a formidable partnership and horrible opponents.

John McGovern was one of the first three players Clough brought in, following him south from Hartlepools just as he would later follow Clough to Leeds and Nottingham Forest. John O’Hare came to Derby from the Sunderland youth team that had kept Clough from the dole briefly two years before. Most dramatic, though, was Roy McFarland.

In later years, McFarland would display the same courage and independence as Clough in leading the 1973 player’s rebellion (and the two men shared the same one-eyed socialist views with equal fervour). But all that was yet to come when Clough and Taylor barged their way into his parents’ house at midnight in the late 1960s. McFarland was bundled out of bed and told “Take as long as you like, but we’re not going anywhere till you make a decision.” Shock and sleep deprivation.

And selfishness, and bullying. Not for survival’s sake, this time. Feeding and clothing the kids now took a back seat to Clough’s desire to take revenge on fate. If he wasn’t to be a striker, then he’d be a manager. It was a wildly imbalanced, tunnel-visioned take on life, from a man bent on discovering what benefits could be squeezed from fame and achievement. He’d find out, in the end.

Sleep deprivation was a constant feature of Brian Clough’s life in his first four years at Derby. Club business kept him at the Baseball Ground from early in the morning until after seven o’clock - and then would come the long miles along the narrow trunk roads of the day, without the benefit of power steering, driving wherever was necessary to watch a player or negotiate for a player.

Peter Taylor was in the same boat, and on one such trip to Lancashire spotted a diminutive but angry little Scot called Archibald Gemmill. Gemmill’s son would later play for Clough at Nottingham Forest, but his wife was not impressed when Clough - let off the leash by Taylor - arrived late in the evening demanding her husband’s signature. Gemmill, caught between a rock and a hard place, pleaded for time, then told Clough that he’d “sleep on it”, more in the hope that Clough would simply leave his house than with any genuine intent.

It wasn’t enough. Clough pulled on a pair of Marigold gloves too small for his hands and did the washing up, before kipping down in the spare room. He was still there in the morning, still keen. Gemmill, despairing of ever being rid of him, signed.

The great Clough capture - also at Taylor’s suggestion - was Dave Mackay. Mackay had starred in the double-winning Spurs team of the early sixties, been a top international player, and now was looking for a first step into management.

Taylor’s account of the way Clough eventually brought Mackay to bear suggests that he had been half joking when nominating such a famous player to his partner. A kind of, “it would be nice” comment, but somehow Clough tracked Mackay down and persuaded him within two hours not to go to Hearts as boss but to come to Second Division Derby County where an alternative and preferable future apparently lay.

Dave Mackay was no pushover - he came with a reputation as a leader, a “hard man”, and a stylish, classy, intelligent player who had - before Clough’s babyface swam into view - spent his entire career at the top of the game. He was older than Clough. That he could be diverted into Derby County tells you everything you need to know about Clough’s “ability to handle big egos and top players” in the modern cliche.

Mackay tells the story, beginning with a phone call:

“Dave, Brian Clough here. I’ll get straight to the point. I’m building a team at Derby County that will be in the first division within two years and champions within five and I want you to lead it. Interested?” ‘Yes, I’m interested to hear more,’ I replied cautiously. I replaced the receiver and picked up a Sunday newspaper and scanned the end of season league tables. I finally found Derby County at 18th place in Division 2. He must be bonkers, I remember thinking. He turned up a day or two later at the ground. He looked fit and young in a neat suit, collar and tie, with his hair quiffed back almost in Teddy Boy style. He was positively evangelical about Derby County and his enthusiasm was infectious. Suddenly, I could see a few more years of playing football. Management could wait. I had never come across anyone quite like Clough. He introduced me to a world of four-letter insults, slamming doors and even an underlying hint of physical violence. He was a whirlwind in the dressing-room. A man of extremes. Hostile one minute, almost loving the next. But his players adored him and respected him with a passion.

But Clough wasn’t finished - and now that Mackay was on board, neither was Taylor. Mackay found himself locked into the manager’s office, with Clough sitting to one side of him and Taylor to the other. They wanted him to play as sweeper. Mackay, accustomed to covering every blade of grass on the pitch during a game (it was his waning powers in this regard that led to him considering management) was having none of it. At first. Let young Roy McFarland do the running for you, the pair whispered, and you’ll have even more influence over the game than you had before.

Mackay gave in, in the end, and took his revenge by making sure that “young Roy McFarland” lived the Mackay lifestyle. Clough and Taylor indulged Mackay, who never really trained - but when McFarland began following his skipper into bars and clubs, he was brought straight back down to earth and confined to his digs for a time.

As with goalkeeper Reg Matthews, Clough understood from the start that different kinds of players required different kinds of treatment to get the best out of them, and wasn’t afraid to show favouritism if it produced the right result. But then again.. where was the choice to do otherwise?

Alan Hinton, a brave but limited winger, arrived from Nottingham Forest to complete the blend. After an inauspicious first season, Derby swept all before them, and Clough’s first trophy in football was the Second Division Championship.

In the First Division for season 1969-70, Derby were the surprise package. Crystal Palace, promoted alongside them, narrowly escaped relegation. Derby got off to a flying start, and only tailed away towards the end of a season of easy, flowing football of a kind that they would never quite match again, eventually finishing fourth, four points behind Revie’s Leeds and thirteen behind runaway champions Everton.

In November of that first year back in the First Division, Clough’s rapidly growing stature in the game was confirmed when he was approached by Barcelona and offered the post of manager by the Catalan team. Barcelona were at a low point, crippled by the need to pay for their spectacular new Nou Camp stadium, and looking for inspiration. Clough turned them down (they went for Vic Buckingham instead, Bobby Robson’s mentor) as he would turn down the offer to become Greek national manager the following March.

Given Clough’s worries about money and desire for stability, at first sight his refusal to allow either Barcelona or Greece to make him a wealthy man makes no sense. Neither does it seem to fit the scale of his ambitions. But there was something deeply parochial inside Brian Clough - a deep tie to the familiar and to home.

Over the course of his career, the East Midlands was as far away from his native north east as he felt willing to go for any length of time. At Derby, he was, for now, well in control. He had no language problems, and his friends (almost exclusively coming from outside football) were within easy reach. And from 1970 onwards, anyway, he fully expected to become England manager in the not distant future. Until then, the team he was building at Derby would suffice.

Building that team into a team saw Clough at his peak at the start of the 1970s. It wasn’t all discipline and Mackay’s slamming doors. John O’Hare: “Once Clough found out that I was worried about my wife who had a lump on her breast. The next day he had her booked into a private nursing home at Ashbourne.”

The second season in the First Division might have come as a disappointment, given how much had been promised by the first. Ninth place, finishing even behind Southampton, doesn’t seem like a Clough season. In part, that is a consequence of Clough’s own mythologising of his career.

Ninth place is in fact a very typical Clough result, and would characterise his Derby team’s later years after his departure and sum up Nottingham Forest’s 1980s.

What’s more, having “arrived” in the First Division, Clough was taking his media presence up a gear, stirring controversy in the press and on television. It was, perhaps, a good thing for Clough that Derby won the First Division title at only the third attempt, as it gave him what turned out to be a brief stay of execution, a few months more before the not inconsiderable hubris he was building up and the enemies he was collecting caught up with him.

Mackay left at the end of 1970-71 to begin his Clough-and-Taylor-delayed management career. His replacement was another Clough old boy, Colin Todd, whom Clough remembered from the youth team at Sunderland. The fee, £175,000, was a national record - but Clough hadn’t told Sam Longson that the money was being spent until after the deed was done, with a curt telegram reading “Signed you another good player. Todd. Running short of cash. Brian.”

This kind of maverick behaviour is obviously attractive and entertaining, especially if you’re not Sam Longson and you aren’t the chairman of Derby County.

But it’s terrible politics, and it marks the point at which Longson and Clough truly began to part company. The sheer lack of diplomacy, rudeness and recklessness involved made Clough look like a football manager of the new, publicity-hungry breed, leading others in his train like Malcolm Allison. For now, the close competition for the League title kept Clough safe.

As the games counted down with Derby remaining in close contention with Leeds, Arsenal and Liverpool, Clough and Taylor invented an approach from Coventry City to inveigle better contracts from the board.

Derby completed their league programme in May 1972 not knowing their fate. A fixture pile-up including an FA Cup Final meant that Leeds still had a game to play. Draw, and the title went to Elland Road. As things panned out, that would have secured them the double of League and Cup. Alan Durban, a survivor from Clough’s first Derby squad, remembers Leeds’ failure:

Don Revie kept them in their hotel on the Saturday night after they’d won the FA Cup. He should’ve let them have a drink, let their hair down, relax. They were good pros, those guys, and with the Wolves game on the Monday night, they wouldn’t have abused their privilege. Revie tried to keep them psychologically screwed up for two major games for too long. Clough and Taylor would never have done that, they’d have had us around the table, swapping stories over a few beers or letting us see our wives or girlfriends. They were always spot on at distracting us and then switching the light on when they thought we were ready. That was the great thing with those two - there was never any real tension coming back to us. They’d leap on someone occasionally just to remind us who was in charge, but there were very few rucks. They got us all together, as team mates and friends. Cloughie saw us as his extended family.

Years later, Clough was to remember the title-winning Derby team as a side of friends, a group of men amongst whom he was sublimely at home and with whom he was at peace.

Durban’s account is only one of a number coming from this period that tells us for the first time exactly how Clough went about his job. It displays a basic philosophy - footballers play at their best when they are relaxed and unworried. Football is a tense enough game already - the hard part is preventing your players from winding themselves up too much, stopping them playing with fear. Sven Goran Erickson makes the same point today, and the experience of his England in Germany in 2006 shows just how hard a thing it is to achieve.

Derby County - Derby County! went into the European Cup as England’s representatives, and came very close to winning the trophy at their first attempt. In the Second Round, Derby came up against Benfica of Portugal, still one of Europe’s premier clubs and former winners of the trophy. What followed was and remains Derby County’s finest hour.

The first leg took place at Derby’s ground, and, for Derby, it was a glittering occasion, attended by a large chunk of the UEFA bigwigs, including President Sir Stanley Rous.

The weather on the preceding days had been good, and Rous was driven to ask Clough after the game why, after such a dry spell, the Baseball Ground pitch had been practically waterlogged. Clough told Rous that it was a feature of Derby weather that rainstorms could be extremely localised, so Rous, in his hotel near to the ground, might have missed the storm that swamped the pitch.

That, of course, was a lie. In fact, Clough had - unknown to Sam Longson - got hold of a complete set of keys to the Baseball Ground. On the night before the match, he had waited until everyone had gone home and all the lights were off, before letting himself quietly in. Clough had become accustomed to watering the pitch without the groundsman’s knowledge, and usually, having turned the hoses on, his habit was to sit in the stand watching them for twenty minutes before declaring that enough was enough and going home.

This time, worn out by lack of sleep, the pressure of events in the boardroom, and perhaps helped along by drink, he dropped off. By the time he woke up, the ground was saturated.

In the dressing room before the game, Clough broke the habit of a career, or seemed to. Normally, he paid no real attention to the opposition, preferring to assume that his team would be the one causing all of the problems. On this occasion, the biggest game in Derby’s history, he asked Peter Taylor to run through the Benfica team man by man.

Taylor stared at his notes for a full half-minute, then screwed them up and threw them away. “There’s nothing to worry about with that lot.”

Derby went out onto their saturated pitch surrounded by their adoring fans in their new stand, and, in Clough’s words, “pissed all over Benfica”. They won 3-0, and there was little danger in the second leg, which they drew 0-0. A tighter 2-1 aggregate victory over their Czechoslovak opponents Spartak Trnava, left them facing a European Cup semi-final against Juventus.

Brian Clough Part Nine

To understand the true nature of what happened to Brian Clough in 1965, some history is in order. Until the Great War, the Football League had two divisions. In 1919, that became three through the simple expedient of incorporating the top division of the Southern League. (Grimsby Town were also elected to Division Three: their fixture list for that first season, comprising of no one else north of Birmingham, must have been exhausting).

The measure brought a tranche of young, relatively healthy south-of-England clubs able to compete with their older, northern rivals. Although promotion into the Second Division was hard - for most of Division Three (South)’s existence, only the Division Champions would be promoted - the idea proved a great long term success, as the statistics demonstrate.

Of the 22 clubs elected to the first Third Division in 1919, 13 have spent time in the First Division or Premier League. One team, Portsmouth, has actually won two League titles and an FA Cup. One other club - Southampton - has won an FA Cup, and others - QPR, Watford, Crystal Palace, Brighton and Millwall - have been seen in FA Cup Finals. Only Newport County and Merthyr Town of those first 22 are no longer league clubs.

The need was felt to balance things by creating a second “third” division from non-league northern clubs. The problem was that practically all of the viable northern clubs were already league members. Third Division (North) was a rag-bag of misbegotten, insolvent clubs with horrible, broken grounds and small, fickle audiences.

Of the 20 clubs elected to the Third Division (North) in 1920, none have ever played in the First Division or Premier League. (The current Wigan Athletic were formed in the wake of the demise of Third Division (North) pioneers Wigan Borough, and are therefore a different club). None of the clubs has made it to an FA Cup Final. Only one - Tranmere Rovers - have seen a League Cup Final, which they lost. Of the original 20, only 12 still play in the Football League.

In the 1960s, even that runt had a runt. Hartlepools United were the worst club in the Division by a distance, and could count themselves lucky to maintain their status. But that gave them one thing in common with Brian Clough: desperation. And they had another: links with Len Shackleton.

Shackleton appears to have been genuinely fond of Clough, and saw him as a fellow sufferer from intelligence and originality in what was and is an essentially and deliberately stupid industry. But Clough was also very useful to him. Shackleton was no longer a disgruntled footballer; he was a successful newspaperman, and Clough had been an excellent source of quotes for the best part of a decade. But Clough had been sacked; he was no longer on the inside, privy to gossip - or, for that matter, provoking it.

The friend in Shackleton wanted to help Clough before his post-sacking spiral got out of control: the newspaperman wanted him in the game for the sake of the material he generated.

Len Shackleton found Clough and told him that he could secure him the job as manager of Hartlepools United if he was interested. “Well,” Clough replied, “It’s a bit thin on the ground around here with Middlesborough and Sunderland. So the answer’s Yes.”

It had had to be very thin indeed. Clough said later:

Len was as influential off the field, being a big star in a small place like the North East as he was on it. So he could talk to chairmen like Ernie Ord (of Hartlepools), and he got me the job. But Hartlepool weren’t just bottom of the Fourth Division, as it was in those days: they were cemented there! They had to reapply for reelection six times out of seven, so that’s how bad it was.

It was the worst job in professional football, in other words: the least likely to succeed, the least glamorous, the poorest. What’s more, the local rivals were Newcastle United, Sunderland and Middlesbrough, giants by comparison, effortlessly hoovering up whatever local talent was to hand.

By accident, then, Clough had fallen upon exactly the kind of opportunity a managerial career needs to get properly underway.

There are two ways to get a managerial career going. Either, start amidst the ruins of a once-great club reduced to desperation (Busby at Manchester United and Shankly at Liverpool are the two best examples) or begin extremely small (O’Neill at Wycombe, Ferguson at East Stirling). Of the managers who dominated the Football League and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, none bar Bob Paisley took over a flourishing organization, and that’s to do Paisley a disservice: he’d been an essential figure behind the scenes since before Shankly’s arrival.

Clough’s arrival at Hartlepools is always written up as the real start to his life, the beginning of something spectacular. His playing career is glossed over; this is what fans are waiting for; here comes Cloughie etc. Everything will be OK now.

But it wasn’t like that for Clough. For the man himself, his real life was his playing career, and management never took its place. But it’s an old saw that nothing is better than playing, that retirement can come too soon, as it did for Clough - and, under slightly different circumstances, for his old rival Jimmy Greaves.

And Peter Taylor’s arrival at Hartlepools United as Clough’s assistant is always hailed as the master-stroke that began a dynasty.

That wasn’t true either. Clough’s appointment at Hartlepools was an act of charity and a media stunt. Taylor’s arrival wasn’t made with the intention of melding his skills with Clough’s.

Shackleton had had a front row seat in the Clough show for the best part of a decade, and had seen Clough rejected by the dressing rooms at both Middlesbrough and Sunderland, and knew that Clough’s sacking at Sunderland despite some success as Youth Coach had come through Clough’s alienating every member of the club’s board. Unless something was done about it, Clough would be dismissed by Hartlepools in short order, and the supply of entertaining football stories and gossip would dry up once more, this time permanently.

What’s more, Clough didn’t really know anything at all about club management. He claimed later to have been “talking club management” for years with Peter Taylor, but there’s no evidence to back him up.

Taylor, on the other hand, had been thinking about management. He’d done more than just think. Peter Taylor had learned the trade. At Coventry City, he had played under the formidable Harry Storer. Storer was one of a group of post-war managers who built on Herbert Chapman’s pioneering example in taking charge of his club, taking an interest in his players and in the style of play itself. He had strong feelings about his team: personal discipline was a priority, as was “moral courage”, the ability to retain enthusiasm when everything was going wrong, to resist the urge to hide from play. We know less about the specific way in which Storer identified the players he wanted - and much of it must have been instinctive - but we do know that Taylor spent his time at Coventry in an intense study of everything Storer did, making notes as he went.

Some months after Clough’s terrible injury against Bury for Sunderland on Boxing Day 1962, Taylor “ran into” Sunderland manager Alan Brown on holiday. It’s not clear how accidental this encounter actually was. Perhaps not very: Brown found himself unable to shake Taylor off for his entire holiday. Peter Taylor was at his side from morning until late evening, asking question after question about football management, soaking and squeezing the information out of Brown. At first, Brown resented his everpresent interlocutor, but over the course of the fortnight realised that the questions he was being bombarded with were the right ones - that Taylor was deadly serious in his desire for information - and when, at the end of the holiday, Taylor told him that he’d given him the “A-Z of Football Management”, Brown was deeply flattered.

By the time Clough was sacked by Sunderland, Taylor was earning £41 per week as manager of non-league Burton United. It’s not clear what led to his becoming assistant to a younger, less experienced man, on a wage of £24 per week. Was it Cloughie’s famous persuasiveness, as most accounts would have it? Taylor wasn’t even assistant manager at Hartlepools (such things didn’t exist in 1965); he was “trainer” albeit with no knowledge of modern fitness training or the treatment of injuries.

It’s most likely that Shackleton sold Taylor the idea, by convincing him that it was a step up into the Football League, that he would be the power behind the throne and in a position to take over when Clough blew up - to say nothing of being in a position to prevent him from blowing up. Taylor joined Clough, not with a view to a great future, but to prevent the present, already bad, becoming worse.

Nevertheless, it was certainly Clough, not Shackleton, who persuaded the board at Hartlepools to take Taylor on. It was no mean feat, as Clough had already begun to hate his employers. Of the chairman, Clough would have this to say years later:

I worked hard at it, kept them afloat, so to speak, and survived a human villain called Ernie Ord. Oh, he was a horrible man! We can’t libel him now because he’s been dead 20-odd years: I just wish it had been 120-odd years.

In 1965, assistant managers didn’t exist - that we are familiar with the idea now has everything to do with the success of the Clough-Taylor partnership. In fact, most boards of directors would have been more familiar with the idea of the “secretary-manager”, a figure who would administrate the club under their guidance, buying and selling players, keeping the team fit and perhaps encouraging the team to consider tactics between themselves from time to time.

The big “personality manager” had only just begun to emerge in the previous fifteen years, at large clubs like Wolverhampton Wanderers and Manchester United. At Liverpool, Bill Shankly had only just started to pick up trophies; at Leeds, Don Revie had yet to win anything at all, and he was still chiefly famous for his tactical nous as a player. In bringing Taylor on board at Hartlepools, Clough was not only doing something completely new, but he was establishing himself with the board in a way none of his predecessors would have dreamt, let alone dared.

For ten years, Clough’s intelligence and mouth had had to bump up against authority figures who were his intellectual and sporting inferiors. Hartlepools might have been the worst professional club in Britain, but it gave him his head for the first time. It would be a vivid experience for those around to witness it.

But it must be emphasised what this all was: Hartlepools was not “before Derby County, before Nottingham Forest”. At the time, it was very much “after Sunderland”, a ledge to grab onto when falling.

He was on a ledge, then, but he was king of the ledge. Brian Moore remembered:

I had to interview him for BBC radio and he was terrific value for one so young. He was driven by the fear of unemployment, by self-preservation, and he put everything into those early years. He despised journalists who thought they could talk about the game but he loved football gossip, who’d fallen out with whom. He also liked to know what other managements were like in other walks of life. In those early days at Hartlepools, there was a deep conviction to do things in a strong, orderly way with Peter Taylor. They blended so well and they beat the system from deep in the Fourth Division. They changed the role of management from the most unpromising of situations.

Clough got to work, and, just as in his playing career, he made sure that the press were at the very heart of everything he did. Television cameras were there as he stood underneath the leaking main stand, holding a bucket to catch the drips as he appealed for donations. When the ground was - finally - redecorated, it was Clough the cameras found with paint brush in hand.

They were called in, too, to see him pass his Public Service Vehicle Driving Test which would enable him to drive the team bus. His powers of persuasion even compelled a local brewery to pay for new floodlights.

At night, Clough worked the pubs and clubs like a revivalist preacher, using his by-now well-practised public speaking skills to urge local men to come to games, to dip into their pockets for what Clough was determined to make into their club.

Peter Taylor might not have realised just how unpromising his situation really was. After a few weeks spent watching the players the two of them had inherited, Taylor took Clough aside and told him,

Something’s got to be done about this lot - and quick. We’re in the shit good and proper. We’ll be asking for re-election at the end of the season with this team. They’re bound to finish bottom unless there’s a place even lower in the bloody table.

From the bottom of the Fourth Division, Clough was quickly becoming one of the League’s better-known managers. And, using a mixture of local knowledge and Peter Taylor’s crowded contacts book, the team gradually improved. One acquisition was a sixteen year old grammar school boy, John McGovern. McGovern was an orphan, whose headmaster intended for university and a good career. Clough had other ideas, and smuggled them into McGovern’s imagination. Once they were safely there, Clough urged McGovern’s mother and headmaster to allow the boy to decide his own fate, knowing that he wanted to play football.

John McGovern went on to lift two Football League trophies and two European Cups in a career that followed Clough’s own, playing for him at Derby, Leeds and Nottingham Forest.

But there were other boys whose plans Clough changed, who were less fortunate. We never hear from them, or from the players whose careers Clough ended or started downhill over the years. In football, more than anywhere else in human life, history is told by the winners. (Or, these days, by the drinkers).

Clough’s action in pulling McGovern into football was not an act of kindness: even in the 1960s, grammar school and university gave onto opportunities that outstripped anything football had to offer. Opportunities that wouldn’t dump men back into the real world in their thirties emotionally underdeveloped and without prospects. Clough was very much in the role of the forceful, selfish man imposing on someone weaker than himself. After all of the loss and fear his own poor education had given him, you might have expected him to treat McGovern with circumspection and care.

But there’s no evidence that he did care, care that he was deliberately denying a boy the education that he himself would have desired, and doing so for his own ends. The hard fact is that all managers - including the faux folk heroes - play games with other people’s careers. So much, once again, for football’s great men, for old-fashioned loyalty and the values that are supposedly rooted in the people’s game.

By the end of their first full season in charge, 1966-67, Clough and Taylor had hauled the Hartlepools wreckage so far up the beach as to finish eighth, with crowds up twenty percent on the preceding year.

They wouldn’t stay to see the story through: the following year, under Angus Maclean, Hartlepools won promotion for the first time in their history. An astonishing, for ‘Pools, crowd of over eleven thousand saw a 2-0 win over Swansea secure a place in the promised land of the Third Division. Being ‘Pools, they wouldn’t be there for long, but Clough and Taylor had given them a moment when everything looked as if it could be different.

The story Clough tells of his own management career is that of a man who took obscure nowhere teams to the heights in a way unprecedented in their history. It’s not just Clough who pushes that line - so too do the press. Clough and Taylor, they say, sparked miracles whereever they went - and, because of those miracles, Clough should have been England manager.

At Hartlepools, “miracle” might well be the right word. In the eight seasons prior to his and Taylor’s arrival, ‘Pools finished 17th, 19th, 24th, 23rd, 22nd, 24th, 23rd and 15th. What took place then can only be put down to Clough - a desperate man scrambling to hold on to the only life he wanted, but also a loud, revivalist preacher of a man, endlessly brave and persuasive.

The other side of what happened at Hartlepools set a different kind of precedent for the future. Almost from the off, Clough was at loggerheads with his board of directors, especially the bollard-sized chairman, Ernie Ord.

Ord was quick to recognize the consequences of Clough’s publicity stunts and independent behaviour. In the eyes of the press and the people of Hartlepool, the club was quickly becoming Clough’s, and the directors’ relative torpor and inadequacy was being shown for what it was. Furthermore, they were quickly losing real financial control over what was going on - the appointment of Taylor, whose role they simply did not understand, was proof of that.

In the first full, successful season, these conflicts came out into the open. Ord made it his habit to turn up in the dugout at matches. Clough, provoked, threatened to throw him out, physically, if he didn’t leave under his own power. Then, upset by Clough’s high local profile, and threatened by Clough’s increasingly national fame, Ord declared that his son was henceforth in charge of all publicity. That was simply ignored.

Then, with the crowds increasing rapidly and ‘Pools climbing the Fourth Division table, Ord took a step too far. He tried to sack Peter Taylor, citing financial reasons. Clough refused, furious. So Ord sacked Clough.

This was Clough’s second sacking in two years, and he wasn’t having any of it. Instead, he simply ignored Ord, and remained at the ground, in his office, for 48 solid hours. His principal ally on the board of directors, John Curry, rallied support for Clough and Taylor, and, before the two days were up, a coup was staged at an emergency board meeting and Ord ejected. Hartlepools United needed Clough and Taylor more than they needed their chairman - so the chairman had to go.

Clough would not always be so fortunate in the men who fought his corner. But for now, his luck held, and a few weeks later, he and Taylor received the first real break either of them had had for years.

Brian Clough Part Eight

It would prove to be a saving grace: the threat of a players’ strike in 1961 finally brought an end to the maximum wage in English football after 60 years. (You can read a superb discussion of the issue and its history here). At the same time, Clough became a leading player at a leading club, albeit one not enjoying the best of fortune, and for the first time in his career was earning “top money” as Alan Brown had put it. The abolition of the maximum wage didn’t mean the end of the scandalous retain-and-transfer system - that would have to wait for George Eastham to put his head on the block two years later. But so unusual was it for Clough to be in the right place at the right time that the strike and abolition stand out.

And how typical of Clough’s career that an injury requiring a long recuperation should occur only a year later, preventing him from making the most of his first real financial opportunity. Had he left Len Ashurst’s pass, Sunderland might have had another 15-20 goals that season and been promoted; Clough’s eighth professional season would have been a glorious head-to-head with Jimmy Greaves, perhaps even including a revival of his England career.

Clough’s England career was definitely hampered by playing in Division Two. Sven Goran Eriksson was criticised for favouring players with Champions League experience, but forty years before, much the same bias was exercised with regard to the First Division. The greatest centre forward of his day, Tommy Lawton, accepted a transfer to Notts County of Division Three in an attempt to shore up his financial future. To the dismay of his England colleagues, he was ignored by the selectors soon after, and the national squad went to their first World Cup without him. Clough’s own intelligence and impulsiveness put off the clubs who might otherwise have brought him into contention with Greaves and Kevan earlier, but it was the retain-and-transfer system that did him most damage.

Once Clough was allowed out of bed after his injury - months and months of frustration and boredom, coupled with the despair of watching Sunderland fall just short once again - it would take him another year to recuperate. Hellish recuperation: hours of running up and down the stands at Roker Park, rebuilding the muscles in his thighs and calves that would, more than ever before, have to support his weakened knee.

In retirement, Alan Brown claimed that he had always been aware of the severity of Clough’s injury, and that the long afternoons slogging up the steps had been meant to allow Clough to realize for himself what he was up against. A year is a long time, though, and Clough was not a man to forgo demanding answers as to his likely future. Clough was a huge talent, and Brown would have been as desperate to see Clough back on the pitch as was the player himself.

Just when it was finally going well, just when there was real direction to life, Clough was obliged to spend his 28th year in pain, in soullessly repetitive recuperative exercise, unable to help his side or his own interests. The fear and frustration that lay just below the surface of this character so many thought to be confident, the impulsiveness, the sharp intelligence denied its rightful challenges, all told once more, as they had told at Middlesbrough. Clough quickly lost what friends he had in the dressing room.

Len Ashurst thought that Clough was changed by the experience. Clough had always had a good relationship with the press, but now that began to take centre stage, and some of Clough’s own playing colleagues, Ashurst included, came in for personal attack. Ashurst also thought that Clough changed his accent, deliberately, at this time, beginning to drawl his words.

Simon Barnes put it well: “personalities” become that way because their real personality is inadequate in some way. Clough had always been too smart, too interested, too articulate, for the head-down party-line locker-room atmosphere of English football. His mental compatriots were Scottish - Bremner, Lorimer, Johnstone, Baxter, Law. Imagine that mind in constant pain, worry, fear for the future and - as a provider for his young wife and family, precarious - and a reaction seems inevitable.

Ashurst, though, was merely reading the future into the past. Clough didn’t remodel himself whilst injured; didn’t refit his psyche and behaviour for the years to come. What years to come? Either he recovered from his knee ligament injury, or there were no years to come.

Sunderland won promotion in the early summer of 1964, without Clough’s help. Alan Brown left the club shortly afterwards.

The new manager was George Hardwick, an outstandingly handsome man (friendly with, amongst others, Ava Gardner) who had been captain of the great English post-War national teams. A man of dominant, self-confessedly bullying character, he had had his career ended by a knee injury.

Clough was just a striker with a long term injury when he arrived, but one fighting for fitness with determination with one hand whilst alienating the rest of the camp with the other. Hardwick gave Clough something to do. Clough was to help train the youth team.

Much has been made of Clough’s approach to the Sunderland youth team, and not enough has been made of George Hardwick’s influence on the way it was run. For Hardwick hadn’t come to Sunderland out of the blue: he had managed both PSV Einhoven in Holland and the Dutch national team itself. It was whilst Hardwick was in the Netherlands that their football began to emerge - in 1967, only six years after Hardwick left, Ajax were to thrash Liverpool 5-1 in Amsterdam before drawing 2-2 at Anfield. George Hardwick is one of the names that are regularly accredited with the invention of what would become Total Football.

The Sunderland youth team’s survivors of the period tell of how they were taken away from endless lapping of the pitch and put into six-a-sides, skills training, change and variety: this cannot, in the circumstances, have been Clough’s doing simply because, at first, he wasn’t even officially Sunderland Youth Coach. Hardwick’s influence has to be taken into account. That Clough found the work congenial is true enough, but there are no signs that he had any intention at all in life other than to continue playing. Assertions that he had thoughts of his own about coaching and management at that stage are probably false. But, asked to do it, it seems that he could.

And he was lucky, because Sunderland had a golden youth squad at the time, who were about to dominate the FA Youth Cup. With Clough’s help, they reached the semi-final in 1964. They’d reach the final in 1965, and win the competition outright in 1966 and 1967.

Hardwick wouldn’t be there to see it. Despite taking Sunderland to their highest post-War league position, he was sacked in the summer of 1965. But not before witnessing Clough’s return to the first team, or his first goal in the First Division, scored against - who else? - Revie’s Leeds.

Clough’s was one of the great recoveries from injury. To return to the first team after eighteen months of pain, tedium and conflict was an outstanding achievement. But Clough was trapped in the 1960s, forty years away from the treatments that would have, in all likelihood, taken his career on into the 1966 World Cup. Sunderland had done their best for him. But even in that game against Leeds, in the moment of vindication, it was impossible to miss two things. One, that Clough had lost all of his pace, and didn’t trust the knee enough to run on it as he had once done. Two, that he was limping.

A less intelligent man would have been amongst his intellectual peers in football. Clough was too young and too sharp, too desperate and ambitious, all at the same time. Too many important people around him were intimidated by him, and chose to regard that as an unforgiveable sin in a man whose allies were conveniently fragile. Hardwick was Clough’s protector by the end, at Sunderland. Shortly after the manager was fired, Clough, too, was sacked.

August 1965 saw the start of England’s World Cup winning season. Neither Martin Peters nor Geoff Hurst, scorers of the four goals in the final the following July, had yet played for England. Greaves, Clough’s closest equivalent in terms of ability in Division One, enjoyed only a fraying relationship with England manager Ramsey. The chance, for a hard-working striker of supreme talent, at his peak, was there to be taken. At Clough’s testimonial, in October 1965, Len Shackleton described Clough as the greatest striker he had ever seen - a man who, had he been playing in the 1920s, would have eclipsed even Dixie Dean. Football saves so much of its empty hyperbole for men it has betrayed and abandoned, but Shackleton was a friend; he meant his words as comfort, but he might well have meant his words.

31,000 people turned up for the testimonial, to Clough’s lastiing gratitude; that, plus his £1500 settlement from Sunderland, almost - but not quite - kept the wolf from the door.

It’s hard now to properly communicate the scale of the disaster that overcame Clough in the spring and summer of 1965. The one thing that had saved him from his unsuccessful education, at a time when that was so often the decisive factor in the direction of the next fifty years, was gone, forever this time. The one thing he had been good at, that had won him the status and recognition of his peers, that excited him, gave him direction, meaning, purpose - gone. With nothing to replace it.

And, for all his careful husbandry and second income from journalism, nothing to pay the bills. Not only was the life he loved absolutely over, but his domestic situation was desperate and worsening, with a drastic decline in his living standards - and his own childrens’ chances in life - only weeks away.

Over the course of the summer, eyewitness accounts say that Brian Clough began to drink to excess, put on weight, withdraw, become depressed.

Up and down the country, other men were in the same situation. Football, that great supposed repository of all the good old virtues, in the good old days of ‘66, spat out what it couldn’t use, with little, or, usually, no, thought for what lay ahead for them. It would have done nothing to prepare them for the future - testimonials were all that would be provided, and only after a certain length of service, and only if the club could not really avoid providing one.

A strange, brief, mostly poorly-paid career, then: spent either trapped at a mediocre employer uninclined to use his talents or to release him to use them better elsewhere or at a good employer but unable to work, in a culture that was dead set against his kind of bright, ambitious, impulsive young man - and it ends, or must have ended, in one final walk out into the club car park. You can imagine how that must have gone: Clough beside his car, digging in a pocket for his keys, and, as he turns them in the driver’s door lock, he perhaps catches sight of his reflection in the window for a second. His face there, and, up and down England, hundreds of other faces caught in car windows as they prepare to go home and tell their families that they are on the dole.

What would Clough have seen in that brief moment? “Cloughie”? “Old Big ‘Ead”? I think he’d have refused to look; I think he would have turned away rather than see his reflection just then.

Those that the English find too intelligent to understand they make eccentric. Rejecting intelligence when they meet it in person, calling it arrogant, yet they’ll take credit for it as a national characteristic. I prefer Roger Waters’ description in “The Final Cut” of the environment Clough had to come from, one “Laughing too loud/At the rest of the world/With the boys in the crowd.”

Footie books, orange with nostalgia, will note that the Sixties were swinging, that the nation was a blur of mini skirts and mop tops and fashion and satire and plastic furniture and James Bond. In the north east, that other staple of 1960s life, the balance of payments deficit, would have been the only relevant one: Clough’s youth, for all that he had hated industrial life, had been one of expanding employment and relative opportunity. Clough’s sacking came when all that was over and the long, long decline beginning.

It’s a story of how poor opportunities were for the intelligent working class boy; of how intelligence put people at odds with the closed, paranoid culture they emerged from; of a “national game” that used both supporters and players unforgiveably, covering its tracks with nostalgia and moulding-flashed patriotism; of a game that behaved more like a cult than a proper sport, keeping its best practitioners back for the lowest cultural and financial reasons.

I don’t think Clough would have looked at his reflection; I think he’d have turned away.

Brian Clough Part Seven

Thanks are due to Dave Heasman for pointing out my mistake in the last article in this series. Chelsea beat Sunderland to promotion in 1962-3, Clough’s second full season at Roker Park, on GOAL AVERAGE, not goal difference. Goal average - the number of goals scored by a team over a season divided by the number of goals conceded - was the tiebreaker at the time, and made all the difference between Chelsea and Sunderland who had both finished with 52 points.

Sunderland, like Middlesbrough before, had a tendency to ship goals away from home on the grand scale. It wasn’t something they were prepared to do by halves: in 1961-2, they conceded a full 10 goals more than Orient (who went up on the strength of an extra point over the Rokerites, only to fall like Satan from Division One the next year). Not satisfied with that, they let in 13 more than Chelsea in that agonisingly close promotion race of 1962-3.

Clough didn’t play every game of 1962-3 owing to the first real injury of his professional career, but it showed less than might have been expected - in 1961-2, Sunderland scored 85 goals (a full 16 more than Orient), for 53 points, and 84 goals in 1962-3 for 52 points. Consistency, unrewarded.

I can’t be the only person who watches the footage of the Kennedy assassination, with its golden weather and beehives and sundresses, whilst reflecting that there is something terribly seventies about the sun. Not that Jackie O would have thought so then, of course, but the entire scene is shocking in its inadequacy as a setting for horror. Cut out the worst scenes and it might all be the backdrop for an episode of Cliff Michelmore’s “Holiday Programme.”

Football had to wait until the seventies to become seventies, what with Match of the Day staying black and white until 1969, but there is something seventies nonetheless about the kind of company that was frustrating Clough as he played his football in his northern city on his island in-between Camelot and Krushchev.

Because it was Shankly’s Liverpool who ran away with Division Two in 1961-2. Two years earlier, Liverpool had been close to the bottom of the table. In 1973-4, Shankly would finish his Anfield stint with a burst of trophies: UEFA Cup, Championship, and FA Cup. In 1962-3, Tony Waddington’s Stoke City won Division Two, going up with Tommy Docherty’s Chelsea. In 1972, Waddington brought Stoke their only major trophy, the League Cup. Docherty would spend the Seventies first as king of Manchester United, then as King Over the Water.

Sunderland were finally promoted in 1963-4 - coming second in Division Two to Don Revie’s Leeds United. To complete the picture, the man who replaced Docherty at both Chelsea and Manchester United, Dave Sexton, was manager of Leyton Orient for a while after their spectacular fall from grace in 1963-4…

And that’s the danger in writing about football, isn’t it, the constant temptation to see the present day - or, in this case, the footballing seventies - taking shape in the football of the past. Herbert Butterfield would call it Whig History; nevertheless, it’s interesting to note that of all the teams who would win 1970s League titles, the most successful of them during Clough’s career in terms of trophies was Nottingham Forest, with an FA Cup win in 1959. Liverpool, Derby County and Leeds were in Division Two for most of the period, whilst Arsenal continued to produce reasonable teams without actually winning anything. Once the Busby Babes had gone, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Tottenham Hotspur (with a bizarre Ipswichian interlude under their Essex-born coach, Ramsey, intervening) were the dominant sides.

Part of the secret of Clough’s goalscoring success was his good fortune with injuries. He was almost ever-present for Middlesbrough, and then Sunderland, for seven years. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the first team was not the rigid eleven of the Chapman era, and, despite the lack of substitutes, some idea of the importance of the squad had come into play. But, given that he was fit, and had a deserved reputation as a fanatical trainer, it was inevitable that Clough should play, both for his goals and his on-the-field communication (at Middlesbrough, he was club captain to boot).

Even to this day, there is something brutal and cultish about the attitude towards injuries in football. Men who “play through,” or worse, “run off” injuries are admired and celebrated. It isn’t something that translates into real life. A factory-employed football supporter, applauding Stuart Pearce’s attempts to play on with a broken leg, wouldn’t react that way to an industrial injury or to a road accident. It’s a translation of a comicbook attitude to war. In real war, you don’t hear the phrase “it’s only a scratch” that often, because it’s so rarely just that, and when it is, the chances of infection are high enough to encourage a more mature approach.

In that sense, spectators have sometimes been guilty of forgetting that their heroes aren’t real people. But the attitude extends to those who should know better. Shankly, that great working-class hero, subject to this day of ridiculous, fawning biographies to an extent that even Churchill has begun to escape, cut injured players dead in the corridor.

And when Clough finally did pick up an injury, in a home game in bad weather on Boxing Day in 1962, Alan Brown’s first reaction was to prevent the trainer taking Clough’s boots off in case the player would be going back on.

Brown had known immediately that Clough’s injury was going to remove him from the rest of that game against Bury. He’d have been responding very much in the moment, and, having been watching proceedings through sleet and hail, wouldn’t have been able to see the full situation from the dugout. He’d have seen Len Ashurst’s pass to Clough go astray, Clough chase after it, Bury keeper Chris Harker hesitate then lunge, Harker and Clough collide. But no more.

In fact, Harker’s shoulder had slammed into Clough’s knee. Hip and knee injuries are the bane of a footballer’s life, both made worse by the natural wear and tear of athletic life. In the early 1960s, they held more potential for trouble than broken legs (albeit remembering Derek Dooley’s amputation at around this time) - Dave Mackay, of Spurs, broke a leg twice and returned to the top level of the game twice.

In David Peace’s superb The Damned Utd , Bob Stokoe - who’d manage Sunderland to FA Cup glory in 1973 against Revie’s Leeds (a bit of anti-Butterfield again) - mocks Clough while he is on the ground in agony. I’ve not been able to source the story, and Peace’s book is after all a novel.

Mocked or not, Clough had torn his anterior cruciate ligament. Generally, when that happens, the knee is destabilised, the shin bone moving forward in relation to the thigh bone. There would be no football for Clough for a long time after Christmas 1962. There wouldn’t be for his team mates either. The winter of 1962-3 was the worst for fifteen years, and football would be at a total standstill for two months. Clough would play for Sunderland again - and score for them - and do both in the First Division. But not for Alan Brown.

Brian Clough Part Six

The irony behind Brian Clough’s transfer to Sunderland is that, according to the tables at least, Middlesbrough were marginally the better side. In season 1960-61, Middlesbrough finished fifth, one place above Sunderland. But the story is stranger than that narrow gap would indicate.

Middlesbrough enjoyed a fine season at home, winning thirteen of their 21 games, and coming away with a goal difference of +24. They lost at home only twice, a better record than either of the promoted clubs. Away from home, they lost ten games, and shipped an astonishing 54 goals in the process - the third worst total in the division. Away from home, Sunderland conceded 18 fewer goals.

Little wonder that Clough was keen to make the switch. Here, at last, was a club whose defence would give him something worth playing in front of. In the year before his arrival, Sunderland scored 75 goals. In his first season, his presence took that up to 85, 16 goals more than Leyton Orient, who somehow beat them to promotion by a point. A year later, Sunderland were denied promotion purely on goal difference, and if that sounds unlikely in a team that had Clough playing up front, well…

For all that Clough himself described his first season at Sunderland as “lovely days”, there really is an air of something like happiness about him in 1961-2. Of course, he was somewhere where he was genuinely wanted, at last, no longer having to depend upon his goalscoring to win dressing room politics. He was playing amongst men who had the same big ideas as he did. There was real hope, all year, that he could look forward to Division One in the autumn.

But there was more to it than that. He was playing for Alan Brown.

Alan Brown wasn’t the first “friend” Clough had made in football, but he may well have been the second (Middlesbrough’s reserve goalkeeper, Peter Taylor, had befriended Clough and kept the younger man onside in many a tense situation through the strenuous use of humour. Taylor wasn’t a particularly talented player, unlike Clough, but was clever enough to keep up with him). The friendship didn’t come in 61-2, of course: Brown was a disciplinarian manager, and would not have stood for familiarity with any of his players.

But that strength helped Clough. At Middlesbrough, there was always the feeling that no one was really in charge: in a way Clough had been compelled to make himself heard, to put himself forward, as no one else felt inclined to display strength or direction. At Sunderland, Clough knew where he stood, and where other players stood, a restricting but deeply secure experience for an intelligent but impulsive young man.

Brown, like Clough, had had experience of being unappreciated in football, and had left the game for a long period to join the police force. That experience, and the clicheed morality that was presumed to go with it, were part of Brown’s appeal for Sunderland, and it would be easy to link it with his dependence upon a strict regime at the club.

Regardless, it enabled Brown to assemble a team of strong characters under captain Charlie Hurley. Clough was pulled into line quickly after an early training ground incident, treatment which he “took like a man” according to Brown, coming into the manager’s office immediately afterwards to offer a full apology. Another apology - unasked for in this case - followed after a bad team performance.

Clough would already have looked like a “Brown” player on his arrival - settled, married, smartly dressed with short hair. Others would have to adapt.

But just as it would be wrong to assume that Brown drew all of these (very noticeable) aspects of his approach from the police force, so it would be wrong to assume that Brown was a crowning example of some kind of good old fashioned “traditional manager.” It would be wrong because Clough had already been playing under the classic old-fashioned secretary-manager at Middlesbrough, Bob Dennison. Dennison was far more like the typical Football manager in the league’s first sixty years, a figure who saw his role as playing go-between for the board and players, his aim as survival and the quiet life. The era’s exceptions - Herbert Chapman, Scott Duncan, Frank Buckley, and, by 1961, Busby, Shankly and Stein, were just that - exceptions, whose influence would eventually spread and become the norm. In the process, they’d cover the evidence of what came before them. Brown never quite made the heights of that group, for all that he would take Sunderland into Division One in the end. Nevertheless, his approach and ideas had more in common with what was new in English football than in what was old.

Clough’s behaviour towards Brown - hero-worship, in essence - wasn’t just the consequence of gratitude, or the flattering manner of his rescue from Middlesbrough. It was the natural admiration of the imaginative, insecure, aggressive personality for the restrained bully. Clough had had to dominate at Middlesbrough, without possessing an accepted dominant role, and that need to be the strong personality in an environment of relatively weak and unfocussed ones had lost him friends and allies. At Sunderland, the dominant role was taken by someone who knew how to wield it appropriately: Clough could step down, relax, and play the best football of his life.

Season 1961-2 went down to the final game. By now, it must surely seem to be just the thing that would happen to Clough: promotion went down to the last match of the season. Sunderland fell short. Seven seasons after his debut, the man who was arguably one of England’s top two strikers - and one of the best three since the Wall Street Crash, alongside Lawton and Greaves - had two caps, no medals, and had never played in England’s top division. “Lovely days;” scarcely “good old” ones.

Brian Clough Part Five

Clough’s international “career” began in 1957, when he was picked to take part in a tour of Iron Curtain countries by England Under 23s. He started well, scoring against Bulgaria, but was dropped for the next game in favour of Derek Kevan, a centre-forward of the traditional kind. Jimmy Armfield was there to witness Clough’s reaction:

He was absolutely astounded when he came back to our room. Utterly deflated. He had done what he was picked for, scoring a lovely goal. That decision really rocked him, and you have to wonder now about Walter Winterbottom’s judgement, because big Derek never had Cloughie’s ruthlessness in front of goal. His despair was all the more striking because Cloughie was such a confident lad, yet so young. He was much brighter than the average players on that trip and he was not afraid to pipe up and speak his mind in front of the manager. Even at cards, he was better than us - he gave up trying to teach us bridge!

It’s the simplest thing in the world to mistake loquacity and verbal facility for confidence. At about this time, Clough’s Middlesbrough team mates put up a round robin demanding his demotion from the captaincy. At least Clough’s various biographers are prepared to admit that that incident cut through “Cloughie”’s “surprisingly” thin skin and caused him real hurt.

In 1957, the full England team were on an astonishing run of form, driven by a young Manchester United core of Byrne, Edwards and Taylor. Between the end of the 1954 World Cup and the Munich Disaster in February 1958, England won 18 of their 27 matches, beating Brazil, West Germany, Spain, France and Yugoslavia along the way. They were undefeated between October 1955 and November 1957. This was in spite of an inconsistent selection committee and the age of some of the better players (Matthews’ failure to be selected for the 1958 World Cup was controversial for all that he was 43 years old by that stage; Finney was in his late 30s, as was Billy Wright).

When the Munich Disaster gashed into Manchester United and England, Derek Kevan, not Clough, was brought into the squad.

Clough was 24 and the World Cup gone by the time he made his full debut against Wales on October 17th 1959. He failed to score (Jimmy Greaves was England’s scorer in a 1-1 draw). His international career, and his striking 3-way partnership with Greaves and Bobby Charlton, came to an end 11 days later, at Wembley in a 3-2 defeat against Sweden.

Film of that match still exists, and may be all that remains of Clough’s playing days apart from a small number of black and white photographs.

Clough hit the bar that day, but England’s formation - two wingers banging in crosses towards three men, none of whom were famous for their heading (Clough had good technique, which he’d partly learned from watching golf stances, but preferred the ball to his feet) - didn’t suit his game, or Charlton’s, or Greaves’s. It was Clough who took the matter to Walter Winterbottom.

Like Clough, Walter Winterbottom’s career as a player was ruined by injury, and his coaching would be hampered by his having, like Clough, a superior mind to those around him. Unlike Clough, he was in a position to use his mind without penalty. We can assume that Clough, 24 and one of the two best strikers of his day, chose his words unwisely. He never played for England again, despite continuing to score at an astonishing rate for another three years.

Clough’s failure to gel with Winterbottom is a shame in retrospect. Winterbottom was a modern coach in his day, and had done much to restructure football coaching in England in the post-war period. World Cup victory in 1966 had a lot of Winterbottom’s hidden work involved in it. His job was only partly concerned with managing England - something that escapes commentators too often. Clough’s brief international career was almost his only contact as a player with the changing, modernizing face of English coaching in a period when the best of it was once again catching up with the rest of the world.

Winterbottom wanted Ron Greenwood as his successor. It was one more political battle with the FA that he lost. Alf Ramsey was brought in from Ipswich instead. England so nearly had the young, fresh-thinking Greenwood as manager. Instead, he took over at West Ham, promoted to the top tier for the first time in almost thirty years, and within four years took them to a European trophy.

Greaves and Charlton went to the World Cup in 1962. Clough was still to play a single game in the First Division. By that stage, his status as a perennial outsider in his chosen milieu must have been obvious to him.

But life still held local status and comfort. He married Barbara in 1959 - another intelligent Clough - and for their summer holidays in 1961, Brian and Barbara took a cruise around the Mediterranean.

At the end of the cruise, their ship docked at Southampton. With a long journey ahead of them home to Middlesbrough, Clough made sure he was first off the ship. Handling his luggage on the quayside at six o’clock in the morning, Clough was surprised to be greeted by the manager of Sunderland, Alan Brown.

Brown and Sunderland’s unusual approach needs to be set in context. In 1961, the Wearside club were still trying to recover from a calamitous end to the 1950s, which, after a decade of heavy spending in search of success (they’d become known as the “Bank of England” club as a consequence), had ended with financial scandal in 1957 and relegation - for the first time ever - in 1958. Alan Brown, a former policeman, had a reputation for a dramatic kind of uprightness and, (in a combination that has a distinctly pre-War feel to it) for advanced football thinking, a willingness to learn from other sports and other arenas generally.

Sunderland were a club all too aware of lost greatness. Once the “team of all the talents”, they’d last won the League title in 1936, so by the time Brown interrupted Clough’s unpacking, they were in a position analogous to Manchester United in 1989, eager to get back to where they felt they belonged, but not knowing quite how they were going to achieve this.

To Brown, Clough’s goals seemed like one way of making the trick. He had interrupted his holiday, he told Clough, to come to see him: the deal was done, and Middlesbrough were happy to release him. Clough shook Brown’s hand:

Done. I’ll go and sort it all out. No need for you to come. You go back on your holiday, you’ve earned it. Now I’ll try and sort out this bloody baggage.

Clough looked back on Sunderland with huge affection:

It was the happiest time of my life in terms of football. Sunderland folk are beautiful, much warmer and more genuine than those at Middlesbrough and we had a wonderful relationship going. I was young, happily married, my first two kids were born in Sunderland, I was cracking in the goals. Lovely days.

Lovely days indeed - Clough would score 54 goals in his 61 games for Sunderland, and at last he was central to a side who wanted to achieve things. But apart from that happiness, and a general ambition to advance in the game, there is little hint at this time that Clough had any real strategy for his life, any sustained plans for the future.

He wasn’t feckless - from the beginning of his playing career, he’d saved money against a rainy day, and he proved a determined family man in the early part of his marriage. Clough had curiousity beyond football - as his relationships with the press and interest in Bridge (scarcely a working-class pursuit) showed. But there is no sign - none - that Clough was thinking beyond his playing days.

At about the time Clough signed for Sunderland, the first proper colour film of English football was being taken - usually of FA Cup Finals and other very significant matches. (Match of the Day, when it came, began in black and white and continued in that format until 1969). The game bursts into colour and looks immediately recognisable: baggy shorts have already gone, and although boots still look a little larger than they would become, the ankles are bare. For the most part, teams are already in their familiar strips (the last big change being that of Leeds United from green and gold to all-white under Don Revie).

Every generation of sportsmen thinks that theirs is the one that has finally broken through the chains of the past into the sunshine of reason and the application of science. Every generation finds the training methods of its predecessors alternately comical and nostalgic.

British Pathe have a film of Middlesbrough training in 1936. The players look thin, insubstantial, as if they’d break when you dropped them. There is nothing quaint about their training, although the ball gets away from them from time to time. George Camsell, scorer of 59 goals in a season for Middlesbrough in the wake of the offside law change in the 1920s, stands out, with beautiful touch and control.

How different is 1936 from 1961 from today in terms of training, and is it really a story of progress? Much modern fitness is so bizarre (ice baths? creatine?) that it’s easy to assume that it’s driven more by fad than by thought. New age thinking has burrowed its way into the NHS (we live in an age when EMDR - look it up yourself - has made it past NICE, which would have been incredible to the age of Doll and Medawar) and surely has a presence in football (I suspect at London Colney for a start).

Treatment of injuries is one area of obvious progress. Clough’s injury of Boxing Day 1962 would probably not have ended his career had it occurred on Boxing Day 2006. But we still labour under the idea that playing through and with injury is somehow heroic and admirable rather than stupid and barbaric.

Late 1950s and early 1960s fitness, furthermore, was contained entirely within a milieu dominated by smoking and drinking. Moderation was not the rule and some top players - notably Bobby Moore - might well have been described as functioning alcoholics.

And the essential look of fitness has changed. The gymnasium set up at Highbury by Herbert Chapman in the 1930s, and all those that followed in the next three decades, looked in many respects like factories, like industrial installations. Now gyms look and sound like offices or living rooms - some of them are offices and living rooms. Fitness has gone white collar.

Something similar is happening to the game of football itself. It isn’t evident from the football literature of Clough’s career that the game was expected to be anything other than exciting, competitive and demanding of courage. The famous phrase “working class ballet” is Alf Garnett’s, which dates it to after 1965: Pele’s “Beautiful Game” is later still. If such thoughts existed before the 1958 World Cup, and Brazil’s stunning stylishness, then they did so off the printed page. Working class ballet reaches across a narrowing divide to middle class sport.

Bridge-playing, thought-expressing, independent-minded Clough spent his playing days falling into that divide, or so it seems now. Then he met Alan Brown, who he’d come to venerate, and with Brown came Clough’s “Lovely Days.”

There’d be so few of them, and they were followed by the end of everything.